PerfAlert! - Major Website Monitoring Service

How Joe Raymond started their web page design journey

Summary

This will be a major site marketing launch. Our goal here is to get a great working design for our home page, which will set the tone for the site and the product, and a template page design from which we will build the rest of the site. After the contest, the winning designer will have substantial additional project work to help design the rest of the site, landing pages, and marketing materials.

I will do my best to provide speedy and helpful feedback. I will use the following system for ratings:

1 star - Wrong direction, start over again with something completely different
2 star - some elements I like
3 star - getting closer but need revisions or a different take
4 star - design is being considered
5 star - definitely the kind of thing we're looking for, in the final selection group

Company name

PerfAlert.com

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

PerfAlert is a website monitoring service that remotely tracks and reports on the health and performance of our customers’ business-critical websites.

The main page (home) will be designed as a landing page. It will be targeted at execs, not consumers, so we are looking for a serious tone. But we don’t want to overwhelm them with reading material in the first 10 seconds. We’ll build plenty to “learn more” pages to handle the researchers. Our goal is to convert them on a free trial of our service. The tone and message are: “Start monitoring 10 sites right now. Seriously. Your site and your competitors. Why not try?” (With better copy, hopefully, but you get the idea.)
- Professional look: audience is high level executives, not consumers
- Simple organization of several concepts at the top in a main message area with Call to Action, and more detail lower on the page.
- We like the use of silvers, gradients, and boxes with slight borders.
- Home page should have one main Call to Action button. “Free Trial. Sign up now” with an arrow of some sort

Wants

Here are some examples of things we like:
- http://www.clearspring.com/ - very nice. Big, clear, organized. Very little friction or anxiety here. The colors and general tone might be a little too consumer, but we like the organizational aspect of the page.
- http://www.symphoniq.com/ - now here we’re starting to see the right tone for the right audience.
- http://www.mint.com/ - I like the simplicity and organization, but the colors are too green and happy and light.
- http://www.clickequations.com/ - colors are pretty ugly, but the clean organization of the page is nice.
- http://evernote.com/ - we’re not a mobile app, so this isn’t perfect. But we like the texture and sense of space. It seems to add a comfort level and reduce anxiety. Also, the organization of the page is similar to the Clearspring and Symphoniq web 2.0 model, but they’ve taken a different approach, with rows of information, rather than columns, in the info section (“On the web”, “On your phone,” etc). This might be worth trying.
- http://www.omniture.com/en/ - again here, we like the professional tone. I’m not thrilled about the shade of green, but since we’re going for execs, not consumers, perhaps it’s better than light blues and red. We’re open to suggestions from the pros (you).